Posted
by
kdawson
on Monday April 19, 2010 @07:08AM
from the lat-lng-is-the-new-address dept.

theodp writes "With the location land rush in full swing, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld declares it's time for an open database of places and calls on the Big Dogs of location — Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, SimpleGeo, Loopt, Citysearch, et al. — to make it so. An open database that maps latitude and longitude coordinates to businesses, points of interest, and even people's homes should just be part of the basic fabric of the mobile Web. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley was enthusiastic about the idea (in a standing-up-at-a-cocktail-party sort of way), says Schonfeld, while Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was a little bit more lukewarm and cautious. Time for Larry and Sergey to invite the Families to a sit-down at 37.423021,-122.083739?"

For all intents and purposes, Google can implement this themselves and do whatever they want without the help of anyone else in the named list.

When people start saying "for the good of all", they typically mean they want someone else to foot the bill. Of all the weirdo ideas I've heard, Foursquare has got to take the cake. It's really no wonder the CEO is enthusiastic about sharing this info; he stands to gain a huge database and backend for no cost. I suppose when you're bleeding money and you're known as the second coming of Gary Kildall, it might be to your advantage to act enthusiastic about everything and anything that might make your company look better than the crappy Web 2.0 service it really is.

You sure about that? Check the copyright message at the bottom of this map [google.com], for example. They've been building up their own map database, probably as a side effect of all those Street View vehicles running around. More info here [searchengineland.com].

Too bad this isn't about map data, but about geo location data. Google can easily build a database that maps -39.12412, 128.12351 to "Joe's Bar". No licenses involved. In fact, they already have, they're spidering the information right off of websites for $deitys sakes.

I've never heard of Foursquare and Gowalla until reading this. As of now, I'm pretty sure Google has the ball for running and maintaining a central and heavily used mapping database in the United States. I see Google Maps being used all over the place on websites for various things.

Heck Live/Bing Maps is being used for Weather.com's radar maps. So instead of some central authority, the De Facto services seem to be doing just fine.

geonames is quite a mess licence/copyright-wise - people are adding data there from basically anything, so some if it might be just lifted from any of the online maps, which would be a copyright violation in some countries.

but in general yeah, somebody should have given that erick buddy link to http://www.openstreetmap.org/ [openstreetmap.org] - would have saved some rant time...

geonames is quite a mess licence/copyright-wise - people are adding data there from basically anything, so some if it might be just lifted from any of the online maps, which would be a copyright violation in some countries.

I agree. In addition to OpenStreetMap and Geonames, a few other ones poped up in the geospatial community. OpenAddresses.org [slashgeo.org] - with already 11+ addresses stored [blogspot.com] while it was launched less than a month ago, OpenAerialMap.org [slashgeo.org] - which "rebooted" late last year, and OpenTopography.org [slashgeo.org] too. There's other similar projects out there - the point being: there are several good starting points.

It hasn't been filled with all the useful information within the above mentioned companies databases.

If only there was some why they could add it to the database...

I think the main reason that many businesses may not get behind the idea of adding their data to OpenStreetMap (although that is what they should be doing) is that if they do they will lose the ability to control the commercial monopoly on the data. If you really want an open database with all this stuff in (as the summary suggests), OSM is the best way forward.

Of course. I think you and others have misinterpreted my statement. The OP asked why OpenStreetMap did not fit the criteria. The answer is that it doesn't have the data. Simple as that. WHY it doesn't have the data is because the data holders haven't entered it in.

That brings up the question of whether OpenStreetMap is the best repository for the information in the eyes of those who wish to build businesses off it. I would suspect that it is not, at this point. They do not have the infrastructure to ha

I have used open street map, and I was impressed with how much data they did have. I'm guessing that in the not too distant future, it will become the standard for geographic information as people add to it, much like Wikipedia has become a standard encyclopedia from people's contributions.

Openstreet map is terrific. What we need, however, is for municipalities to understand that it's in their interest to keep it up to date. If a city could update with information about construction, new developments, etc, it would make OSM at the least an important adjunct to the commercial mappers. Not a lot of work for any one city and a great benefit to all.

I don't see why businesses wouldn't want their location in all available databases, but that's for them to decide.

It is terrific, however some cities (ahem Toronto, Vancouver, and others.) are releasing their municipal border data under a different licence than OSM (openstreetmaps), which is possibly even worse than not keeping them up to date properly. If this continues, a developer will need to navigate dozens or hundreds of unique licences in order to display data legally. A serious problem, that needs to be nipped in the bud ASAP.

No. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a database collection of borders, multilingual location names, and data to create maps with. There are also points of interest in it, however in my belief, focussing on points of interest would take away from the constant and more important job of filling the OSM database in with street names, and accurate location information.

The database of OSM is already huge (>70GB I believe), and since points of interest are almost always drawn in Javascript (usually via OpenLayers.or

Now that was strange. I went and looked up the River Severn, the longest river in the UK and home to the second biggest bore in the world and it's a landmark feature of type 'stream'. What on earth does place need to do to get classed as a river?

A good start would be the free release of postal code and mapping data by governments. After all this is information collected with public money, so it should be available to all citizens. The UK has or will release mapping [thenextweb.com] and postcode [bbc.co.uk] data. But most countries still only allow the data to be sold for hefty prices. The most ridiculous part is that in some countries the postal code date is the property of privatized former monopolies.

As a GIS Tech for a county in Michigan I can probably provide a little insight on this. While quite a bit of information is available free of charge at the state level (http://www.mcgi.state.mi.us/mgdl/) county/city governments (where the high accuracy data tends to be) tend charge for data for one main reason. The actual "Data" tends to only be requested by out of city/county, and most often state agencies. The Maps/PDF's/In office/online means of accessing the data are utilized heavily by the Local Tax

I hardly think an open database is the solution. Having an open standard to access any databases with geodata is far more important. That way, developers wanting to combine geodata in their applications can pick whatever they need and either aggregate the information on the fly or draw any information that is available under the proper licenses into their own database for speedy access.

I'm sure someone around here will be able to point out what standards for this purpose are already around and could be used for such a scheme. If not, then that's the first problem that requires solving. Otherwise, these companies will just enter an endless debate about who owns what and why it should or shouldn't be them controlling such a database.

1. There *are* open standards.2. There *is already* an open database, OpenStreetMap.3. As someone already pointed out, that open database uses open standards.4. It seems bizarre to value open standards so much more than an open database. An open database is likely to become an open standard, or be converted if another open standard takes hold. The reverse does not hold true though -- proprietary information is likely to remain proprietary regardless of the existence of open standards (for instance, google maps is a proprietary database).

There is an open standard, infact several open standards and a complete standards organization [opengeospatial.org] for publishing geographical data on the web. How you access the various sets of data however is your problem. In the USA at least the goverment collected data is free, not necessarilly so in Europe.

Are they going to fix the accuracy issue where if I look up a street address it's off sometimes by half a block? I can certainly see this being a good thing later down the road but not for any application that requires accuracy.

We have an online ordering package for restaurants, many of whom what to do delivery within a certain "Radius" and they often wonder why we don't. They think "Oh well, you can use google maps!". Well, Google Maps can't pass the "My Dad's house Test". Which I show them where Google Maps/MapQuest/anything Teleatlas shows my dad's how is located and then where it really is one street over on the opposite end of the street.

Yea, I spent a good amount of time editing the markers on Google maps in my local area, and they NEVER accepted the changes, even though it was obvious I was moving them all to a more accurate location. They need to better utilize crowd-sourcing to make their map data better.

There are a limited number of sources for the data that is "what street address is at what latitude/longitude?" which is technically "reverse geocoding". They are:a) The governmentb) Private companies who spend lots of $$ gathering the data

In the U.S, the government sources are:a) The TIGER database - this is not good enough for the task, but it's freeb) Local city/township and county governments - this is the very best data when it exists, but it doesn't exist in lots of places, and it's hard to get in many places where it does existc) The 9-1-1 system often has their own source of address data which is used to figure out where you are when you call from a mobile phone

In the U.S. the private sources are:a) Navteqb) Tele Atlas

All of the other places that seem to have data actually get it from the above sources one way or another. Sometimes, they have auxiliary data like satellite images or street level images, but the database that links street addresses to geocoordinates comes from one of the above sources. Note that Navteq and Tele Atlas try to get the local city/county data when they can. When they can't they "drive" streets with a GPS equipped vehicle, clicking on houses and other buildings as they go. The 9-1-1 system does the same. The city/county data is actual map data, with polygons for streets, parcels, etc. It's often hard to get address data from it without additional work because the city/county data is developed for land use planning and tax revenue and not reverse geocoding.

The local data probably ought to be freely available, and it's the most accurate, although often somewhat incomplete source of data. Trying to get free access to TeleAtlas and Navteq data is not going to work, which means getting it from Google, Twitter, etc is not going to work.

Other countries have different situations. As noted above, the U.K. mapping data is available, and is excellent quality.